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Planetside 2 Gets Massive Performance Boosting Patch

I’d be lying if I said I have been keeping up with Planetside 2. I had a brief love affair with the game upon building my new computer, blissfully enjoying the mayhem. Sadly the game has one serious flaw: it runs about as well a brick in a blender. While some lucky users get decent performance and manage to maintain a smooth framerate, others, like myself, have a far less enjoyable ride. To put it bluntly the game is optimised so poorly that the developers should feel a bit ashamed of themselves.

Frustratingly, there seems to be no pattern, either. Users with with incredibly powerful machinery have suffered from low framerates, while others with middling computers somehow get a better rate, and vice verse.

But now the developers have released a sizable new patch. While it contains a host of bug fixes and tweaks to the gameplay, it’s most note worthy feature is better optimization for CPU usage. This could see a performance increase of up to 30%.

Given this huge update it looks like I might just have to jump back into the game and fail miserably at doing just about everything.

Check below for full patch notes:

General:

Refactored game rendering to better utilize multiple CPU cores. The same has been done for UI rendering.

Optimized the CPU cost of some purely aesthetic physics objects

Added adaptive complexity levels for physics simulations based on current client performance

Numerous optimizations have been done to remote character processing to reduce the cost of per-player processing.

We found that players getting in and out of vehicles was causing some performance issues. This has been addressed and is working as expected, now.

Audio asset clean-up

Added a frame rate smoothing option. (This is on by default and trust us, you probably want this. It will make your frame rate smoother and reduce spikes. Your FPS counter will show as lower overall, but that’s not a bad thing.)

Adjusted the default graphics settings. (If you push Reset to Default, it will set the graphics settings appropriate for your system.)

FX:

Vehicle debris pieces updated

All bullet impacts optimized

Animation:

Implemented new scatterblend node to provide more fluid third person movement and a performance improvement

Reorganized the networks to eliminate redundancies and reduce the overall network size

Created level of detail version of the third person network. This allows code to switch to less expensive version of the network based on how far away the player is from the camera. This provided our largest performance improvement at approximately a 50% improvement for network processor time.

Consolidated the number of active nodes and pass downs in the network. This simplified the network and insured that costly additive nodes were only active when they were necessary.

Removed state machines that could be replaced with blend trees. Blend trees are more efficient than state machines.

Art:

Optimization pass on First Person arms

Improved usage of textures on various vehicles

Optimization pass on Ace Tool and Ammo Pack

Memory:

Fixed several client crashes (We’re not done with these and should have more coming soon.)

Fixed a few client memory leaks (Not done here either. Still investigating some memory optimizations to help with crashes related to memory.)

UI:

Overhead indicator system overhauled for performance

The HUD, Centralized HUD, as well as the health and shield bars have been redesigned with a new look to increase performance

Now show the HUD facility indicator when you are inside a region but outside of the facility radius

Fixed issues with HUD indicators blinking in when they first initialize

Optimized Indar:

Reduced ecosystem masks

Reduced polycount on most environment objects

Reduced occlusion calculations from most environment objects

Reduced texture usage on some environment objects

Removed redundant objects, replaced with visually similar ones

Adjusted LOD distances

Non Performance

Highlights:

No more double loading screens

Changed recommended server calculation to improve faction balance

AI turret should no longer shoot itself

AV turrets and their projectiles should no longer disappear in large fights

Numerous client focus and cursor fixes such as preventing windows from appearing above the client in full screen windowed mode and the Windows cursor appearing on loading

We’ve disabled GPU particles until further notice. (Due to some our optimizations, GPU particles don’t work quite right and we need to spend some time to fix them up.)

General:

All spawn timers are now the same at 15 seconds. Previously the spawn timers would scale based on location or type from 14-18 seconds, with the majority of spawns being at 18 seconds.

Squad deploy will no longer drop pod players into the center of a bases. It will instead spawn the player at the closest hard spawn point to the squad leader, which includes facility spawn points, deployed Sunderers, and squad spawn beacons

The Infiltrator’s recon dart will now send found enemies to the minimap of all allies in a 150m radius. Previously this tool had a range limit of 50 meters

Increased the drop speed of drop pods. They now accelerate as they approach the ground. Collision damage multiplier reduced to account for the higher pod velocity.

Reduced the horizontal movement speed of drop pods so they land closer to their origin points

Improved look of bullet hit impacts in low settings

Fix to sending tells across servers

Improved particle effects on vehicle deaths for TR and NC

World:

Amerish sky settings have been shifted 12 hours. If you don’t like the onset of evenings on Indar or Esamir, Amerish has bright sunny skies waiting for you

Indar lighting slightly darkend at dawn and dusk

Some outposts on Indar received minor gameplay adjustments.

Zurvan Amp Station has had its secondary spawn room removed and now resembles the other amp stations

Dahaka Amp Station now has gate shield generators

Indar Lattice Additions:

The Crown <-> Crossroads Watchtower

Vanu Archives <-> NS Secure Data Lab

Quartz Ridge Camp <-> Indar Comm Array

Ceres Hydroponics <-> Galaxy Solar Plant

Crimson Bluff Tower <-> NS Material Storage

Benson Construction <-> Alkali Shipping

UI:

We’ve renamed the Indar Warpgates to geographical names. So you will now see the “Indar Northern Warpgate” instead of the “Indar TR Warpgate”

The squad list now has icons for players inside MANA turrets or Drop Pods

The Flash and Harasser mini-map icons have been made more distinct from each other